06.12.23
by

An Award Temple football fans can get behind

Two weeks after Maryland beat Al Golden’s Miami team, 32-24, Bill Bradshaw congratulates Steve Addazio here for beating Maryland, 38-7. It wasn’t that close. After Maryland scored a late fourth-quarter garbage touchdown, Daz had the Owls take three knees inside the Maryland 5 instead of winning 45-7.

Nobody knows how many mistakes an athletic director is allowed to make but, at a place like Temple, the margin of error is smaller than others.

On Sunday, a guy who hit AT LEAST .666 on Temple football coaching hires got the most prestigious athletic director honor that can be awarded: The James J. Corbett Memorial Award is a US award given annually by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA). It is presented “to the collegiate administrator who through the years has most typified Corbett’s devotion to intercollegiate athletics and worked unceasingly for its betterment.”

Pretty precise language when it comes to Bradshaw’s contribution to Temple football.

When you’ve had collegiate football since 1984 (and the school was founded 10 years earlier), and you hire two of the best four college football coaches at said school, you’ve done a remarkable job.

Bill Bradshaw’s photo at the ceremony on Sunday. He seemingly gets younger with each season.

Very few people can argue that Al Golden and Matt Rhule were two of the best four hires in Temple history. (The other two are inarguable: College Football Hall of Famers Wayne Hardin and Pop Warner.)

For one AD to hire half, that’s a job well done and, at least at Temple, fit the criteria of “devotion to intercollegiate athletics and (working) unceasingly for its betterment.”

Put it this way: Compared to the three hires his successor made, Bradshaw knocked it out of the park. Pat Kraft hired, in order, Geoff Collins, Manny Diaz and Rod Carey. The less said about those three the better.

That also applies to the more said about the three prior football hirings: Golden, Rhule and Steve Addazio.

Pretty good for a guy who was a baseball player at LaSalle and came from a place (DePaul) that didn’t have college football.

To put it in Bradshaw’s best sports terms, Golden and Rhule were upper-deck home runs. Daz was certainly not a strike-out or fly out but the argument can be made that he was at least a gap double (first bowl win in over 30 years) or a hard-hit single off the wall while being thrown out at second (his 4-7 season the next year).

Bill sets the record straight on TU football attendance.

Although Collins won a bowl game with a worse record than Daz, he never quite fulfilled his promise (Mayhem) here and Diaz struck out looking while Carey was a swinging strikeout.

Bradshaw’s gift in my mind at least was a knowledge of Philadelphia (he went to LaSalle) and common sense.

He took a yellow legal pad with him to Charlottesville to interview then Virginia DC Golden, watched Golden pull out a binder of East Coast recruiting and coaching contacts, listened to what he had to say, and, on the way home, jotted down: “This is our guy.”

With Rhule, who finished second to Daz the first time, Bradshaw listened to all of the Temple players but still kept his options open. When Mario Cristobal asked for directions to Temple from the Philadelphia International Airport, Bradshaw had second thoughts. Everyone from the Temple police to the players to the cafeteria people met and loved Matt Rhule, who knew every nook and cranny of Temple. Then he ran into Temple icon (and assistant AD) Al Shrier in the hallway of the Liacouras Center.

“Bill, listen to me. Hire Matt Rhule.”

That was all he needed to hear.

Temple was off and running in football again, surpassing what even Golden had done. If you had Temple being unbeaten and hosting College Football Gameday (and then grabbing the all-time single-highest prime-time TV rating FOR ANY COLLEGE FOOTBALL game in the history of the nation’s fourth-largest market), then you might have been the only one. I never saw that coming. That was a day and night we might never see again for Temple football.

A large part of the credit for Oct. 31, 2015 goes to Bill Bradshaw.

For those of us who benefited that day, the Corbett Award is the least he deserves. Sainthood could be in his future, but let’s hope that is many years away. What he did for Temple football was perform the requisite three miracles.

Friday: That First Weekend

Monday: What’s the Deal?

18 thoughts on “An Award Temple football fans can get behind”

  1. Agree with your assessment!

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  2. Great recap of Bill’s contributions!

    Anytime Rod Carey is brought up in an article I throw-up in my mouth a little. I’d personally edit the baseball analogy of him. That guy was struck out standing still, he never even too a swing.

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    • I was thinking that, too, but an 8-5 season in 2019 (with Rhule’s talent, not Collins’) has to earn at least a swing.

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      • HAHa. Alright, I’ll give him one swing, but I was a pathetic attempt and he twisted his knee as a spun around looking more like a ballerina than a baseball player.

      • Even that record doesn’t tell the whole story. That season was a train wreck despite the wins. Carey ran Foley out of town and their was some bad losses. That team had so much talent and should have won the American. Ironically they would have at least potentially been in the championship game if not for a major special teams blunder against Cincinnati. Lord Carey was terrible.
        I only got to go to one game during his last season but it was so telling being behind the bench. Carey was by himself the whole game. No one on the team came up to him at all. They’d all given up on him.

      • That 55-13 loss in the Military Bowl was the last straw for me.

  3. Yep, Bobby Wallace and Carey, probably the 2 worst hires in TU football history but both within memory, among other pretty bad ones. Worst thing about Wallace (altho he came here with a very good resume albeit at the Div.2 level) was that Temple kept him around way too long, whereas with Carey they finally did what most other schools do – get rid of the cancer sooner than later. Yes, Golden and Rhule brought respectability to the program.

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    • Arthur Johnson did something no other Temple AD did in my lifetime, including Bill: Get rid of a guy with years left on a huge contract. He got off to a good start in my book. Let’s hope Drayton and Fisher bring those programs back to respectability.

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  4. Bill could also tell a pretty good dirty joke at the tailgates after the game. Like Rhule, it seemed he could relate to all types of people.

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    • True, Kevin. Pat Kraft was also good with the people but while his decisions were well-intentioned, they didn’t come with the level of research and common sense that Bradshaw had. Even with the Daz hire when Daz said he would bring a lot of the national champion Florida staff with him to Temple that was a major selling point. Big difference between a national champion staff and a MAC championship staff. For two years, Temple had Florida’s DC and Tim Tebow’s quarterback coach.

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  5. AD Bradshaw deserved your tributes for his contributions to Temple Football. He created a great environment. We need this spirit to return.

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  6. Bill is a first-class AD and a first-class human being.

    In a different world, Bill would be the commissioner of all college sports. He would get every bit of it in every sport 100% right.

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    • Haven’t asked him but don’t think he would like the NIL or transfer portal. To me, it’s anti-player, rather than pro-player due to the 79 percent of the athletes who enter the portal with a scholarship and come out without anything. To benefit just 21 percent of the best players is not a sustainable program IMHO.

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      • whether it’s good for the game or not is completely irrelevant for programs like TUFB. This stuff is not happening, it has happened.

        We’ve seen this movie before. Everyone bemoaned the facility upgrades “Arms Race”. TU abstained until the race was over.

        TU begrudgingly made improvements to EO only AFTER we got kicked out of the BE, and our peers landed in the P5.

        No here comes conference realignment and NIL. Again we bemoan the new reality, make a conscious decision not to compete (every P5 school and most of our conference peers have full time NIL staff, TU does not). Listen to the AD talk about NIL.., head in the sand man.., smh

        We can’t complain about the system from the sidelines.

        Everybody leaves TU in the rear view mirror: Rutgers, Maryland, BC, Pitt, Va Tech, Miami, SMU, UConn, Cincy, Louisville, UCF, Memphis

        We are moving closer to C-USA and further away from the P5.

  7. Gee, at least we’re still a member of the AAC!

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